The music industry has been evolving as technology provides greater access to music created by artists (e.g., musicians, singers, bands, etc.). For example, music downloads and streaming services have created different models of providing music and other content. However, while providing easier access to music, these different provisioning models have had adverse effects on artists and fans (e.g., users) alike and also fail to integrate music with other content created by the artist.
For example, individual artists have been experiencing diminishing returns on the songs and albums they create. Various factors such as illegal music download and a la carte purchase of individual songs have contributed to this decline. For users, they must continue to purchase music downloads (or illegally obtain music) or subscribe to streaming services, which requires use of network bandwidth. Such network bandwidth places a burden on streaming services and also requires fans to use oftentimes expensive network services (whose availability may be erratic) and increased battery usage when streamed to mobile devices.
Furthermore, artists have been increasingly using social media (e.g., FACEBOOK, TWITTER, INSTAGRAM, etc.) and other content services to provide artist content to users. However, conventional music provisioning services typically ignore this content, requiring users to separately access music services and social media and other content services. Thus, even though fandom is ubiquitous in the music industry, conventional music delivery services typically ignore this information. What's more, each social media platform typically monetizes an artist's social media account by collecting advertising and other fees related to user interaction with the social media account, while providing little to no compensation to the artist in return.
Additionally, there is conventionally little to no connection between actual use (e.g., playback) of songs to income. For instance, in a content streaming model, payment is typically inversely related to usage because payment to artists is typically fixed regardless the number of times an artist's song is streamed, resulting in decreased revenue per stream as the number of streams increases. In a download model, after the initial payment for download, a given song may be played without further monetization opportunities.
Still further, once downloaded or streamed, artists typically lack control over music consumed by the user. Such lack of control prevents the artist from easily providing a new song, deleting an existing song, and/or otherwise exercising control over the music provided to their users.
Another problem of streaming services is that each individual artist whose music is streamed has little to no motivation to promote the streaming service (because they have little to no financial incentive to do so). These and other drawbacks of conventional content delivery (in particular music delivery) services exist.